Could there be four less inoffensive words than those anywhere in the English language. And yet when big business and government combine them in that form, my anti BS system automatically switches on. I’ve read, listened to and watched anything beginning with the words A New Study Shows, for well over five decades now. I hate to tell you this, but ninety-nine, point nine, nine, nine percent of these ‘studies’ are complete hocum.
Take food stuffs as a classic example of this kind of manouvering of the general public. Whenever there is a glut of a particular product we’re always told that it is good for us. When there is a paucity, the opposite applies. Have you ever wondered why? Studies show, thats why. You can make a study show anything you want, in this case a glut of a product that needs shifting, or a scarcity, in which case all of a sudden ‘studies’ show its bad for you.
What gets me is just how many people actually swallow the total BS in these ‘studies’, convinced that what they’re being told is fact! Just because an actor in a white coat or someone you have never heard of, purporting to be an expert on the subject, uses what sounds like a plausible argument to convince you, doesn’t make it fact?
Just think back to the days before unpasteurized milk. I’m talking about when I was a child in the forties and fifties. Before she skimmed off the rich top layer of cream, my mother always ensured I got to drink at least one glass of fresh warm creamy milk each day when my father returned from the milking shed with a bucket filled to the brim. She made the best butter and cheese anyone could ever taste from that milk.
Once pasteurization became the norm, it ensured that the natural bacteria in milk that is beneficial to all of us was killed off. All kinds of scare tactics were adopted to steer us away from everything made from the wholesome natural product by ‘studies’ which showed that rendering milk inert was good for you. Rubbish! All pasteurization ever did was let greedy businessmen get away with selling us a pale imitation of the real thing to make a hefty profit.
Years ago in the nineteen-eighties when Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, struck the dairy herds in this country, the sales of beef products plummeted largely thanks to those interminable ‘studies’. All kinds of scare tactics were employed under the banner A New Study Shows to get people to refrain from eating anything beef based. The fact that the farmers themselves were entirely to blame for the outbreak, by feeding their cattle on the remains of other cattle, in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), no doubt convinced by yet another of those damnable ‘studies’ that it was cheaper and therefore far better than feeding them grass or oats, was never made public at the outbreak of the epidemic.
The same applies to medicines. If a government decides the price asked by the manufacturers of any new medicinal breakthrough is too expensive, no matter that it will save lives, we’re steered away from questioning their penny pinching decision by yet another of those darned ‘studies’.
I could give you many other examples, but I won’t. What’s the point when so many of you assume that when confronted with what looks like an official study, foolishly you believe everything you are told by government and big business.
More fool you…
PS – Sorry folks I can’t help being a skeptic, I’ve always questioned everything when it purports to be scientifically proven, especially when it comes to those damned ‘studies’.
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I have decided to offer a tell-all of the story behind Runaway Smile on my blog. This is done for two reasons: first, I want to thank all the people who made it possible, especially Dimitris Fousekis and George Vasdekis. Second, I want to inspire any authors who are looking for a way to get published without surrendering all rights to their hard work, but for whatever reason are not interested in self-publishing.
Have We Had Help? 
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